Intelligent Agents

Intelligent agents have been applied to electronic commerce, promising a revolution in the way we conduct business, whether business-to-business, business-to-customer or customer-to-customer. This article gives a brief review of agent technologies involved

E-commerce Intelligent Agents

Aleksander Pivk, Matja Gams

Jozef Stefan Institute, Department of Intelligent Systems,

Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

E-mail: ,

Abstract

Intelligent agents have been applied to electronic commerce, promising a revolution in the way we conduct business, whether business-to-business, business-to-customer or customer-to-customer. This article gives a brief review of agent technologies involved in buying and selling, followed by lists of Internet e-commerce agents. Several agent-mediated electronic commerce systems are analysed in the context of a general model of the buying process. Several lists of related Internet links should help readers to gather additional relevant information. We presented an intelligent employment agent and e-commerce related agent modules in the system. Our experience indicates that new agent capabilities offer advanced functions in e-commerce.

1 Introduction

In recent years the Internet (World Wide Web) due to its exponential growth enabled substantial progress in new information society functions [10,21] such as online commerce. Latest studies of online spending habits of consumers by Forrester have shown that the growth has been explosive, increasing from $2.4 billion in 1997 to $8.0 billion in 1998 and $20.2 billion in 1999 and still growing at a rapid pace.

Electronic commerce entails business-to-business, business-to-customer and customer-to-customer transactions. It encompasses a wide range of issues including security, trust, reputation, law, payment mechanisms, advertising, ontologies, electronic product catalogs, intermediaries, multimedia shopping experiences, and back office management. Agent technologies can be applied to any of these areas [15].

Still, the potential of the Internet for truly transforming commerce is

largely unrealised to date. Electronic purchases remain mostly non-automated. While information about different products and vendors is easily accessible and orders and payments can be dealt with electronically, a human is still in the loop in all stages of the buying process. Traditional shopping activities require a large effort from a human buyer collecting and interpreting information on

merchants, products and services, making an optimal purchase decisions and finally entering appropriate purchase and payment information [20].

Software agents help automate a variety of activities, mostly time

consuming ones, and thus lower the transaction costs. Software agents differ from “traditional” software in that they are personalized, social, continuously running and semi-autonomous [15]. In this way, e-commerce is becoming more user-friendly, semi-intelligent and human-like. These qualities are conducive for optimising the whole buying experience and revolutionizing commerce, as we know it today [20].

2 Intelligent Agents 2.1 Description

There are many definitions of what the term “agent” denotes based on different approaches, expectations and visions. As pointed out by Bradshaw [2], one person’s “intelligent agent” is another’s person “smart object”.

Shoham [25] describes a software agent as a software entity which

functions continuously and autonomously in a particular environment often inhabited by other agents and processes. The requirement for continuity and autonomy derives from human desire that an agent be able to perform activities in a flexible and intelligent manner responsive to changes in the environment without constant human supervision. An agent that functions over a long period of time should be able to adopt from its experience. Further, we expect an agent to inhabit an environment with other agents and processes, to be able to communicate and cooperate with them, and perhaps move from one place to another in doing so [2].

Consistent with the requirements of a particular problem, each agent

might possess to a greater or lesser degree the following attributes [2,6,8]: ??Reactivity: the ability to selectively sense and act.

??Autonomy: goal-directedness, proactive and self-starting behaviour.

??Collaborative behaviour: can work in collaboration with other agent to achieve a common goal.

??“Knowledge-level” communication ability: the ability to communicate with human and other agents with language more resembling human-like speech than symbol-level protocols.

??knowledge of general goals and preferred methods to achieve flexibility.

Inferential capability: can act on abstract task specification using prior ??Temporal continuity: persistence of identity and state over long periods of time.

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